I believe everyone knows about the interview process at Amazon. It is long, tiring, boring and simply a waste of time.
I am proud to withdrew my application after the first round. Details are given below. I hope this will help someone.
In my personal opinion, asking a candidate to code during the interview is useless because in the real scenario no one codes in that limited time. Secondly, if you want to test the coding skills then give a take home test or ask for something like a GitHub account.
I fail to understand that the so called ‘Geniuses’ sitting in Amazon overlooking this process simply don’t get it that anyone can code...what really matters is the logic behind that code...so ideally they should be testing the candidates on that.
In my case I refused to code during the interview. Unfortunately the interviewer was so inexperienced that he had no clue what other questions to ask. It was both frustrating and funny. The interviewer went silent for few minutes and then abruptly ended the call. This happened not once but almost 4-5 times with me. I did write my concerns to the HR who came back and told me that they cannot change the process so I humbly told her that I am not interested in Amazon. For me it is a waste of time and energy.
Advise to the Amazon team -
1. Kindly treat the interviewers as equals. You do not own their career. It is always your loss. Amazon is not the only company with jobs in the world
2. Good companies do not take more than 2 to 3 rounds. If you need more rounds then your team is clearly inexperienced to judge candidates quickly
3. Train the interviewers to ask smart questions and not the text book questions
4. Coding is not the real skill...logic is. Anyone can copy paste a code if they understand the logic behind the problem
5. You have a 6 months cooling period. Your interview process is 6 months long so it is precisely 1 year
Looking back, I'm relieved I declined the offer, despite the intense experience. The interview process felt overwhelming, starting with some tough core ML concepts before diving into the LLM fundamentals. During the technical round, I recognized a tokenization question from a PracHub session I had done just a week before. It felt like a small win in an otherwise challenging interview. Ultimately, the pressure and expectations were high, but I felt it wasn't the right fit for me.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
LLM fundamentals: tokenization design and KL-regularized SFT
There are three rounds in total. The process begins with a coding round, followed by the main interview loop, where you will meet the team and discuss technical skills, experience, and fit.
First round is fun, second round, which is also the final round involved 5 sessions, with different focus. For some sessions, not be able to present my story completely, time was tight, and interviewers were rushing.